Leaked Powell e-mail: “Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris”

Ed MorrisseyPosted at 12:01 pm on September 14, 2016

Just when he thought he was out, they pull him back in. Colin Powell has become Hillary Clinton’s go-to goat when attempting to slough off responsibility for her secret e-mail server and serial mishandling of classified information — and Powell’s own hacked e-mails shows how upset he’s become over it. The Intercept published a number of recent e-mails from the former Secretary of State, including one that demonstrated his frustration with Hillary’s attempts to blame him for her choices (via Jeff Dunetz):

“Sad thing,” Powell wrote to one confidant, “HRC could have killed this two years ago by merely telling everyone honestly what she had done and not tie me to it.”

“I told her staff three times not to try that gambit. I had to throw a mini tantrum at a Hampton’s party to get their attention. She keeps tripping into these ‘character’ minefields,” Powell lamented. He noted that he had tried to settle the matter by meeting with Clinton aide Cheryl Mills in August.

In another e-mail, Powell complained that Hillary and her team would, er … besmirch his reputation. He wrote to Jeffrey Leeds that he understood that classified information went through secure channels, even if Hillary didn’t:

“They are going to dick up the legitimate and necessary use of emails with friggin record rules. I saw email more like a telephone than a cable machine,” Powell wrote last year to his business partner Jeffrey Leeds. “As long as the stuff is unclassified. I had a secure State.gov machine. Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris.”

Powell also complained about losing a paid speaking gig at a university after Hillary’s big fees caused a scandal on campus. “I should send her a bill,” he told Leeds.

These leaks came from “Guccifer 2.0” through the DC Leaks website. This source has been linked to Russian intelligence, which raises questions about their target selection. If they’re still interested in Powell, who last served in government more than a decade ago, then it’s pretty clear that they’d be interested in his successors — and especially one who routinely included classified information in her non-secure, private server.

If people think they’ve seen all of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, Rep. Jason Chaffetz warns to get ready for some surprises. Most of the 30,000 or so that Hillary turned over to State have already been published, except for a few dozen with information so classified that even the headers couldn’t be released. Thanks to the utter incompetence of the administrators of Hillary’s secret servers, the House Oversight chair tells Hugh Hewitt, leaks from the 33,000-plus that Hillary’s legal team deleted prior to relinquishing the rest will almost certainly come out, and sooner rather than later:

Hugh springboarded off of the recent hack of Colin Powell’s e-mails — more on that in a moment — to ask Chaffetz if we’ll see more of the same from Hillary’s deleted stash. Don’t be surprised if we do, Chaffetz responded:

HH: Given the hack that occurred this morning of General Powell’s emails, will you be surprised if Hillary Clinton’s emails end up being leaked?

JC: Unfortunately, no, because what Cooper told us, and remember, this is a guy who really doesn’t have IT background, there was no dual authentication, there was no encryption. We have devices that are missing. You have a laptop that was mailed and they don’t know where it is. It was mailed, and they don’t know where it is. It’s not a very secure network. I mean, what PRN was doing, Platte River Networks, and Datto, one of the cloud storage services that was offered, they didn’t have the proper protections for even the most basic of computer hygiene and protection.

HH: And why is that? why would they be so sloppy?

JC: Because they didn’t know what they were doing. You have a person who’s charged with setting this up, with no IT background. He couldn’t answer some of the basic questions that some of our members were asking about these brute force attacks and these other things. And we’re up against the Chinese, the Russians and some guy in a van down by the river. I mean, this is sitting in the Clinton residence. It’s co-mingled with the Clinton Foundation, Clinton executive services, President Clinton’s server. You can’t tell me that it’s not subject to a whole lot of attention and attack by nefarious actors. I mean, clearly, it is.

Testimony yesterday also suggested that Clinton’s team and Platte River Networks colluded to withhold evidence in the FBI investigation, and might have obstructed justice by creating a fake e-mail:

HH: You’re saying the Clintons, the Clinton legal team and Platte River Networks colluded, in your opinion?

JC: Yes, yeah, well, I mean, they used the word shady, and they wanted some documentation. In fact, they wanted to retroactively insert a bogus email to protect themselves from what they called this shady deal. So I mean, there is a lot to look at in terms of intent. There’s no question that the FBI director has clearly articulated that what was said and done was an absolute lie and deception. He just said he couldn’t prove intent. We proved another thing yesterday, too, at least from the testimony of Mr. Cooper, that Huma Abedin absolutely knew about this server. The FBI report says that Huma Abedin knew nothing about the server. That’s what she told the FBI. But Cooper’s saying yeah, she helped set it up. She had an email on the system. She was aware of it from the very beginning.

Funny, the FBI didn’t find this, and James Comey insisted that the e-mail server was just an example of “extreme carelessness.” Scooter Libby got prosecuted and convicted for offering a different recollection of a phone call with a reporter in a leak investigation. Why didn’t the Department of Justice pursue obstruction charges against Abedin? Perhaps Chaffetz needs to invite Comey back to the Oversight panel for an explanation.